Many, if not most, of my nuclear energy colleagues believe that our biggest hurdle is overcoming public fears. They believe that the main reason nuclear energy is not more popular is that the public is misinformed by the media. What they do not understand is that selling energy is perhaps the world’s largest and most influential business, but it is a business where finding markets (customers) is at least as important as finding and producing the resources.

In my analysis, the main reason that nuclear energy is not more successful in the United States and western Europe is that our competitors are eating our lunch in the fundamental business endeavor of attracting an increasing number of paying customers.

While browsing this morning, I ran across a well-designed, and probably well-funded ad campaign from Shell Oil touting natural gas as a cleaner fossil fuel that produces about 50% of the emissions of burning coal when used in an electricity production facility.

Producing electricity is the application that currently accounts for nearly all of uranium fission’s market share. In business school terms, central station power plants are the “sweet spot” for nuclear reactors since they are the easiest application for achieving the scale economies that allow us to invest in all of the security, redundant infrastructure, and overreacting regulatory ratcheting that our competitors have imposed on our technology.

As you watch that short clip – and I recommend several viewings, paying critical attention to the imagery and accompanying words – think about how it would have to be worded if Shell Oil honestly admitted that it has more than just coal as a competitor in its target market. While natural gas may produce just 50% of the emissions of coal, and while it may be the cleanest burning fossil fuel it produces at least 30-50 times as much CO2 per unit of electricity produced AND it has other emissions of concern that are not produced by atomic fission. In terms of sustainability – which is the closing argument for natural gas in the ad clip – the 87 year supply of natural gas remaining deep underground in the United States pales in comparison to the inexhaustible supply of potential energy that is locked up inside of our uranium and thorium resources. Those resource estimates are even less favorable for natural gas if you recognize that its longevity assumes that we maintain our current consumption rate (24.3 trillion cubic feet (TCF) per year in 2011) AND that we are successful in extracting every last molecule of the proven, probable, possible and speculative resources that make up the Potential Gas Committee’s estimate of our total resources (2170 TCF as of Dec 2010).

Aside: Just in case any of you check those numbers to realize that 2170/24.3 = 89, not 87, please recall that the total resource figure was computed for the end of 2010 and it is now November 2012. The clock keeps running and the gas keeps getting burned at a rate far higher than any possible replacement mechanism from natural hydrocarbon production cycles. End Aside.

So my message this morning, fellow nuclear energy professionals, is that we must get our collective heads out of the sand and recognize that our competitors are working hard to capture our markets and that they are doing it with ads that are deceptively lacking in some key factual comparisons.

I noticed repetitious natural gas ads played frequently during the Fukushima Frenzy. That experience reinforced a key marketing lesson as taught by some of the world’s most experienced and successful marketers of a product that has enormous benefits but carries a certain amount of known risk. The lesson is that it rarely hurts to tout your successes when your competition is down and to do it in a way that helps direct attention to that competitor’s current challenges.

I have no regrets about piling on when a strong competitor in the energy production and supply business is having issues that result in substantial property destruction and human fatalities. I recognize that the competition would like to sweep its challenges out of the public view, and I suspect they will be quite successful in their effort. After all, they have regularly invested in high dollar advertising campaigns and show every sign of continuing to be a reliable revenue stream for any moderately cooperative media enterprise.

Personal aside: This is the month of Movember, a time to recall that men face unique health challenges in the form of prostate and testicular cancer, two killers that are not frequently mentioned in public. Movember is partnered with the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the LIVESTRONG Foundation. I’ve shaved my trademark mustache to start the month, but will be growing a new one along with my Mo-Bros. Updated photos of my less than pretty mug will appear in the widget in the right-hand column of the site.

You can support the cause by donating to my Movember fundraising campaign. Several members of the Atomic Insights community of contributors have provided a head start by adding $175 before the month even started. Thank you very much, Eric, Meredith, Joel, David, Carl, Robert, Jeff and John. End Aside.

Rod Adams gained his nuclear knowledge as a submarine engineer officer and as the founder of a company that tried to develop a market for small, modular reactors from 1993-1999. He began publishing Atomic Insights in 1995 and began producing The Atomic Show Podcast in March 2006. Following his Navy career and a three year stint with a commerical nuclear power plant design firm, he began ...

I will grant that there is a question about whether today's nuclear plant designs can compete with natural gas at today's market price IN NORTH AMERICA. However, my memory is a little longer than most; I recall quite clearly the time when natural gas prices marched rather inexorably up from $1.60 per MMBTU to more than $13.00 per million BTU during the period from 1999-2008. The REAL reason those high prices disappeared - in North America - was that we experienced a severe economic recession that reduced the demand for gas by about 10-20%. The price fell to less than $4.00 per MMBTU within months and eventually dipped below $2 per MMBTU before starting on its way up to about $3.50 today.

In Japan, the landed price of natural gas delivered from distant suppliers via liquified natural gas tankers is $17.72 per MMBTU! Nuclear energy, even with all of the imposed overhead, can easily compete with that price - converting gas at that price leads to a COST per kilowatt hour of electricity in excess of $120 per MW-hr just for fuel (an efficient gas plant uses 7,000 BTU of heat per kilowatt hour), without considering any of the other costs of the power plant, the fuel delivery to the plant, or accounting for any of the waste that the gas produces along its lengthy production chain. No power plant operator can stay in business by selling its product to the customer at its cost of production, so the market PRICE is far higher.

You are wrong about there being no safe and secure storage for nuclear waste. We have been doing that job for more than 50 years. Can you point to a SINGLE instance anywhere in the world where someone has been injured because they were exposed to the waste material from a commercial nuclear power plant? In contrast, I can point to lists of of routine accidents in which hundreds of people each year are killed by exposure to carbon monoxide or other waste products that are associated with producing and burning natural gas. In fact, I can point to instances where there were thousands of people killed by a single accident involving natural gas extraction in areas where hydrogen sulfide is a natural component of the gas that is being pulled out of the ground.

Cost overruns are something that can be addressed through sound design, good project management and and aggressive response to regulatory ratcheting that imposes new requirements and forces design changes for NO gain in safety to the public.

Old, but well maintained nuclear plants do not need expensive rehabilitation in most cases. They are like the energizer bunny - they just keep on keeping on, producing massive quantities of electricity at a very low marginal fuel cost. The AVERAGE cost of nuclear fuel, including provisions for "purchasing of uranium, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication services along with storage and shipment costs, and inventory (including interest) charges less any expected salvage value" for US nuclear utilities in 2011 was just 0.68 cents per kilowatt hour. That equates to about 68 cents per million BTU since it takes about 10,000 BTU of heat to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity in a standard nuclear power plant.

http://nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs/

That is probably enough right now, but I would be happy to engage in further discussion about the cost of nuclear energy versus the cost of natural gas. There are plenty of gas costs that are not factored into today's prices, which is why the rig count for natural gas drilling in the US has fallen by about 50% in the past 18 months. Few producers are interested in the expense and risk of drilling in order to sell their product for a loss making price.

One more thing - on my blog at atomicinsights.com (which is where the original of this post appears) - I have plenty of publicly available information about my vested interests in helping people to understand more about nuclear energy. I am a nuclear energy professional; I have been studying the subject for more than 30 years. I have a good paying job as an engineer/analyst at a company designing small modular reactors aimed at incorporating many of the lessons we have learned in the brief 70 years since we first demonstrated that fission is both possible and controllable. I have invested a fair amount of money in nuclear energy related companies because I believe that their product is so good that the market will eventually recognize that value.

I once spent a large portion of family and friend investment money over a period of more than 15 years working on a start-up company to market relatively small nuclear engines that were designed to use the same kind of Brayton cycle turbomachinery that helps to make gas so attractive - but our designs would not have produced ANY CO2, CO, or NOX.

Can you provide any information about your own interest in the discussion so that people can judge our arguments while understanding the biases of source of those arguments?

Rod Adams, Thanks for your educated and informative reply. I am impressed by your knowledge and background. I knew that from your article however.

My greatest consideration is the potential destruction from catastrophic nuclear incidents, and also from terrorists getting ahold of nuclear waste and using them in dirty bombs. Guardianship of nuclear waste has been frequently reported to be farsical. Guards caught asleep, nuns breaking into Oak Ridge and wandering around etc. Then there have been the coverups of serious deficiencies. We have flood endangered plants that we don't even get information on through the media. Radioactive medical waste that goes lost etc.

You are involved in small modular reactors. Those would be the most vulnerable due to them becoming commonplace and forgotten about. Please reply to this concern.

I am an advocate of natural gas. I am a retired psychriatric RN who lives simple life in a rural suburb.I have nowhere near the background, in energy, that you do. I respect your education and experience. I am just trying to educate the public in what I see as the best way to use our newfound natural gas. This is also a worldwide phenomenon.

I have no investments. I do not even own a natural gas vehicle, but hope to buy one in a few years.

I am greatly concened that modular nuclear reactors will become commonplace, so we are on opposite sides in some ways. Ameren is my energy provider. They provide most of our energy with dirty old coal plants here in Illinois. The rest comes from nuclear plants, which should run their course, since they are already there. Ameren wants to build small modular nuclear reactors to replace their dirty coal plants. I oppose that. Are you involved with them? You chose your career, and I don't blame you for your field. I just see the other side of the story. I have to deal with the anti-fracking extreme environmentalists too. I recently started a converstation with one of them, and it has caused me to start adding some more articles, on my blog, to encourage best practices in fracking.

Ron, it is good to hear that you are supportive of clean energy. Perhaps you've heard that 20,000 Americans die each year from air pollution from burning coal.

But regarding your beliefs about nuclear power, I encourage you to examine why you believe what you believe. We live in an age of professional lobbying and corporate influence. I believe that journalist and bloggers have a special responsibility to check facts and not be inadvertent participants in some company's mis-information campaign.

In reading about energy, I would advise you to bypass all of the activists and read what the scientist say about energy; not just their opinions, but the supporting facts. Bernard Cohen's 1990 book is free: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/ but I really recommend Robert Hargrave's "Thorium - Energy Cheaper Than Coal". Compared to an author like Helen Caldicott, its clear the case for nuclear power is factual, and the case against is emotional (not that emotions are bad, but you can't power an industrial society with them).

Regarding your concern about catastrophic accidents: every industry has bumps its early development. The worst of nuclear is behind us already. Chernobyl was the worst kind of nuclear accident that can ever happen (much of the core was aerosolized by an explosion). Fukushima was the worst that can happen to a light water reactor (the fuel was severely damaged, but only the volatile components were able to escape: gases xenon & krypton plus solids with low boiling points: iodine and cesium). In both cases, the actual harm to human health was small, very small compared to the effects of using fossil fuels. The nuclear power plants we build today are much safer than the Fukushima plant, and the Next Generation Nuclear plant and Pebble-bed reactor (which use a very heat tolerant graphite and silicon-carbide based fuel) will be even safer.

Regarding the alleged dirty bomb, it's simply not plausible to make a dirty bomb that's more effective on a per pound basis or per dollar basis than a regular fire bomb or nail bomb. And unlike regular explosive and sharpnel that become more dangerous when detonated, the dirty bomb is most dangerous while it's being built, and less dangerous once it's detonated (dilution reduces radiation exposure!) - exactly backward from what a bomb needs to be.

For SMRs, human nature being what it is, the number of nuclear accidents that society experiences is likely to be constant, regardless of the number of reactors we have (success leads to laziness, and accidents lead to improved vigilance, as happened after Three Mile Island). So SMRs are good, since they force each accident to be smaller.

As to the best use for natural gas: using it to make baseload electricity is a terrible shame. Way back in the 1970s we figured out that using oil to make electricity was a terrible idea, since we needed it more for transportation fuel. Well, natural gas is the next best transportation fuel (after gasoline and diesel); at today's prices, no other alternative can compete with it, certainly not biofuel, the next cheapest choice would be syn-fuel made from coal or nuclear power. Substituting cng for gasoline improves our energy security and reduce our need for oil wars. Also, natural gas is the cheapest way to provide peaking power - the 5% or so of time in mid-summer and mid-winter when demand skyrockets.

Lastly, I noticed you ignored greenhouse gas emissions. There are a lot of scientist saying we need to cut CO2 emissions (and a lot of paid lobbiests telling us we don't). Switching electric power generation to nuclear is low hanging fruit (like efficiency improvement). If you try to keep burning gas, and make the cuts elsewhere, effective action become unaffordable.

The truth of the matter is that nuclear energy cannot compete with the overall cost of natural gas electrical generating plants or natural gas heating. Natural gas can also be scaled to the need that it is called to meet. Nuclear never has been approved for such uses except in military uses.

Nuclear plants have many costs that are not normally factored in to the overall equation:

1. Cost overruns that are the rule, rather than the exception.

2. The public bears nearly all the cost of malfunctions, and is locked into uncompetitive prices.

3. There is no safe and secure approved storage for nuclear waste, and the costs of storing and guarding nuclear waste is never fully addressed. Repeated security failures are well known to the public. The industry also has a reputation for downplaying failures. It recently came to light that the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented, but the company was afraid to scare the public by actually working on the problem. At least that was the story.

4. The cost of rehabilitating old nuclear plants is prohibitive, and decommissioning a plant is very expensive.

Good luck trying to get the public to allow new nuclear plants when cheap, safe, clean natural gas can do the job without all the inherent risks of nuclear power generation. I will be one of the people opposing it. I have seen what happens over the life span of nuclear plants, and how the security of nuclear waste is mishandled.